Mandog After Action Review
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Artists:Written by Gromb
Illustrated by Wilber H. Force
Edited by Sam Sorensen
Layout by Stella Condrey
Players: Shaman as William "Will/Billy" Slattery
Zaro as Louis Dauer M.D.
Valibuk as Micheal "Mike" Benson
System: Delta Green
Sessions: 3 three-hour sessions
Preamble
These After Action Reviews are going to be a series of reviews for things I have played with a focus on how my expectations in prep differed from play.
As this is the first review I am posting I should make it clear that I am visually disabled. I am legally blind but retain enough vision to read and do basic day to day things. This does impact my perspective as I find most RPG books to be near impossible to read comfortably. Thankfully Mandog has a nice font with easy to parse colors.
What is it?
Mandog is an investigative horror sandbox set in the decaying town of Bullock's Neck. There has been a pair of murders caused by a tortured beast. There are plenty of other nasty things hidden away in the town as well. It's a Halloween module as well! It takes place in a contemporary to 2018 setting with some minor differences. One is the passing of the Turley Act that made law enforcement entirely privatized leaving little towns like this on their own. It is written for OD&D but can be run with anything.
Prep
My prep was light. I had the players be locals from the area who had left and were now returning to check on family. They had one bond in the area.
I also fleshed out Black Moon Syndrome a bit more in case it came up. Just ways to dispel it and other creatures it could affect.
Mandog also got a bump in power as I randomly rolled a new spell from the Delving Deeper spell books each time it got a new heart and brain.
It suggests that the investigation will take place over 10 days. Expecting that slower pace I thought that Mandog would be a slower module, but as is want to happen, Mandog was rolled as the first encounter and came for blood. Did breaking from the suggested order of murders break the module? Was letting players tackle things in real time altering what was intended? Certainly. But those adjustments are the at the moment context givers that separates my game of Mandog from yours. I fuly expected the players to take their time to develop a network of allies who would be torn apart by Mandog. They did make friends with Yul, the clergymen, and their bonds. It wasn't this all encompassing web of helpers I pictured.
What Went Down
Session 1
Our prodigal heroes snuck past the National Guard blockade at night, skirting through the swamps and passing some abandoned homes. Each home drew their attention as they walked south down the road, but none made them stop until they heard a screaming cat. Brought to the window of Jethro Weeg's home, they saw Max the cat tormenting poor Jethro as he tried to slumber. Max was pressing on his bowels, screaming, and whispering spooky meows. We decided that Weegs used to be the PE teacher in town and the boys wanted to see if the cat was "evil" so they knocked on the window. Mr. Weegs was relieved to see the boys amidst all the strangeness going on but had very little to offer in way of o information other than Max's persistent nefarious acts. Max continued to torment Weegs after he went to bed. The players opened the window and asked Max if he is evil. Max shrugged and led the players towards the park to try and get Bobby to zap them! Bobby and Joe were trying to do some occult stuff when the Mike and Billy started seeing what was going on. They left the teens to their own devices while they checked out the statues. This is when the encounter finally hit and it came up Mandog. Bobby and Joe tried to cast Cause Light Wounds but Mandog did not care about their unholy magic. Instead he decapitated Bobby and set Joe ablaze. The players watched from the statue garden as Mandog sawed out their hearts and took their heads. Mandog left. Freaked the hell out they went to Yul's house. ( cuz of my bad eyesight, I misread Yul as being 31 not 11, this really changed how he participated in the adventure) Yul was a fast friend to the party and promised to help them out if they needed support taking on the house.
The session wrapped up with both players getting a chance to talk to their family stuck in the Neck. Mikey is married to Rebecca Nywall who has a captive ape in the basement. This was attempted to be reconciled and made normal by the players until they realized there is no way of making an ape in the basement normal. Bill found the living room of his dad's home dominated by massive 3d printers set up to make lowers for fully auto ARs. This was a chance for the players to improve their arsenal and get a leg up on Mandog.
Session 2
Session 2 kicked off with Billy catching up with his old man and realizing that his dad has sold some lowers to the Wythes, the family that caused Mandog. A little on edge the pair meet a new absent minded, dream obsessed doctor. His first words to the pair were "You were the ones in my dream, finally. You have seen it too right?" And Dr. Dauer proved his bona fides of having dreamt Mandog with his powers of astral projection.
Desperate to find a a way to try and weaken Mandog the trio heads to the church. The Father and the deacon try their best to bless the boys on their journey. They do accompany the Deacon to make a death notification for Bobby and find out the grandma had prepared him to be a vessel for her soul after his death. It took a lot of restraint for the Billy to not do anything about the twisted old lady. And by the end of the session the plan was made to try and fight Mandog on consecrated ground as it was a being of pure evil.
Session 3
They did a bit more investigating but to get to the juice they got a ladder to sneak into the Mandog home during the day. I rolled an encounter when they first climbed up and it was Mandog! He was unaware of the players. They watched it stare into the eyes of one of its victims for a few minutes before they decided to distract it by blowing up the Clam Shack. They put poor ol' Tommy Gunger to rest and blew up his shitty restaurant. Mandog flew out the window to investigate,o the great shock of the players, and they climbed in to grab as much shit as they could. They destroyed all the hearts and brains save one heart, grabbed his grimoire, and rigged the firearms shop to blow. Then a mad dash to the church as the house went up in cinders behind them.
Father and the Deacon prepared their meager pistols and the players set up pews as cover. Great banging came at the door and Yul, charmed, was begging for his old friends to kill him. The players did not want to risk having a murder of an innocent on their hands so they mag dumped at knee level, crippling Yul's legs but keeping him alive. Mandog was using this time to scope out the church and he concocted a plan. He had lost most of his added spells and HD when the organs were destroyed, but by pure lack he still had Stone to Mud. He cast it on the foundation of the church and the whole building started to sink. Big bursts of automatic weapon fire and then Mike cast a spell from the grimoire. I had him lose d10 Sanity and then roll randomly which spell he cast. It was Fear..... Mandog failed its save against the effect and the crew hacked him apart with an axe and some dog flu syringes Nywall cooked up. The church sank into the ground so they threw Mandog in to be entombed in holy ground. The church sank until its cross was the only thing sticking out of the patch of earth.
Dauer got to publish is findings about the occult. Mike got the gorilla out of the basement. And billy helped his dad sell illegal weapons parts for some side money.
Thoughts
Mandog does not reveal its secrets to you so easily during prep. Bullock's Neck is described sorry house after sorry house filled with a parade of losers and criminals. It is a bleak place to begin with.
It has to be intentional that the means to destroy or contain Mandog are left unsaid, other than the standard dice game resolution of extreme violence. There are no holy weapons hidden in basements or buried scripture to undo the beast. This can be frustrating to some. Mandog is a very powerful enemy growing stronger and stronger with each murder. PCs are likely to be low level with limited access to meaningful damage. Across these broken homes though are tons of tools that the clever could use to weaken the beast. Gromb cleverly uses the principle of "present problems, not solutions." My players deduced that Mandog must be some sort of unholy devil so the Church would be a great place to try and stop it. My recommendation would not be to look for some precanned solution to Mandog; instead let it be the tactical playground it is. An important caveat here is that this is not some "imagine the solution and win" type of scenario. Mandog is cruel. Solutions should follow some form of logic that would actually defeat the beast. This means that some groups will probably die horribly because they come up with bad tactics! All the better really. Let them take over other citizens of the Neck who are desperate to stop Mandog or escape.
My prep also included expanding on what Black Moon Syndrome was a little bit just so players could interact with it more. I summed it up as the cult's rituals wearing down the barrier from the malignant psychic properties of the moon causing locals to lose their minds as they become warped by the exposure. Other than a few questions about it this really didn't come up but I could see it becoming an important part of other investigations into the Neck. There are a lot of these little details you ought to fill in before play so you understand the world better. I don't really see this as a negative. Changing details to fit your needs is a natural process of playing modules and inclusion of this "fuzzy logic" is a net positive for the adventure.[^bignote]
[^bignote]:A recent adventure for the newest Runequest edition includes beat by beat options the players might do. It's exhausting to read through since it's all pointless speculation. It's very low trust gaming and the end result is insulting in how it treats the referee as being utterly incapable of interpreting the imagined world. Players should be pissed off about this kinda low trust writing as well because a referee might read that list of player options and take away that those are the only codified ways in which to do something.
Much hay has been made about hooks and "why would the PCs even go there" when it comes to adventures. Most hooks are written so poorly that some amount of retooling will be required to get them to make sense. I feel the same way about the context of "Why are we even here?" These are some of the easiest questions to solve in prep and provided hooks can often get in the way of a better idea. Mandog offers no jumping off point. You are not agents of the Conspiracy sent to hunt down an aberration. Nor scared villagers trying to set things right. The open endedness of "Why the PCs are here?" is to unburden a referee from some imagined obligation to be authentic to the ink on the page. PCs could be paranatural podcasters sent in on a scoop. Exiled warlocks from the cult from years prior. Or even fed up National Guard troops who are gonna go in there and settle what's going on.
None of this is to say that Mandog hasn't put in sufficient legwork. All of the NPCs with their dire descriptions, the flowing map of waiting landmines just ready to daisy chain one after another; the team has put together a neighborhood that is easy to run and realized. All of the grunt work has been handled which is really the highest compliment I can give a module. I don't need to think of street names or who lives where- the answers are in the book. What is physical to the world is recorded and left for the players to run into. I prep my own sessions similarly to how Gromb has laid out this book. Adventures that privilege a strong sense of location seem to lead to better sessions from my experience. A lot of writers aim to write NPCs that are fully fleshed out, interesting beings--- well that is a task that even the most celebrated of literary authors would struggle with. I have never read an NPC description that made me weep. Nor a selection of their inner thoughts that inspired wonder or whimsy. Even the best NPCs are ultimately what the referee makes of them.
Playing from a module is more of a work of adaptation than it is of running things from a strictly defined process. All these varied tables, it would be an extremely arduous task to try and account for all the different tastes, expectations, and ideas of fun that all these people have. There are not a lot of resources that teach this way of treating published material. Most of this kinda thinking has been pushed to community spaces like the ever popular Curse of Strahd reddit. inside a lot of these places the rigors of adaptation take the form of some sort of community sourced design committee. Even during an act of collaboration many contributors seem to be working towards some "true" version of the campaign. I don't think it's a big improvement to shift from the assumed solutions of the author to the consensus solution of the crowd. Yet, the popularity of these specific communities speaks to a need for people to learn how to adapt written things for their tables.
Mandog is the perfect module to hone those instincts with. All of this talk about it not offering solutions or explaining itself is not to say it is threadbare on details. Each house and its occupants could easily be the focus of a session. Mandog's refutation of the defensive style of writing leaves what is there as a powerful mass of potential waiting for that animating spark.
Mandog is certainly the best investigative module I have ever purchased. Most investigation adventures get bogged down in cataloging every skill check and method of approaching a crime to their detriment. They often become convoluted messes of cause and affect the pace of play as you work out the hitches in logic along the trails they leave for you. Mandog offers a look into what an investigation feels like when we step away from the murder mystery school of thought. Mandog has matured the horror investigation adventure. I know if I buy other modules I will be breaking them apart to fit this volatile sandbox approach.